Beyond That, The Sea

Beyond That, The Sea by Laura Spence-Ash was a different take on the World War II experience. It's based on something that I wasn't at all aware of. I knew all about the kindertransport where Jewish families sent their children out of Eastern Europe to safety in England. In this novel, a working class family sends their daughter, Beatrix, from London to the United States to keep her safe. Who knew?

Beatrix was sent to a family in Maine where she "grew up" with the two very different brothers of the host family, The Gregorys. At first, she is scared, missing home and overwhelmed by being part of this lively family. Eventually, though, she adapts to life on this side of the Atlantic and to live in an American family. Life in London and with her quiet parents fade away. So it comes as a shock when at the conclusion of the war, Beatrix is brought home to London. How does she come to terms with the two very different aspects of her life? And what's next?

This is a lovely novel about what it means to be part of a family, to love and be loved, and what war time was like in New England during World War II.

This is another one that I highly recommend.

 

Exile Music

What a beautiful, multi-faceted novel. To call Jennifer Steil's Exile Music a Holocaust novel doesn't even hint at the richness of the story or the language. It's a Holocaust novel but so much more.

Exile Music is the story of Viennese Orly. She is a young teen when  Hitler moves in. She and her parents must get out of Austria. They flee to Bolivia, the only country that will take them. Her brother had already escaped to Switzerland. Orly is leaving behind everything she knows as well as her best friend, Anneliese. 

In Vienna, Orly's family's lives revolve around music. Her father is a viola player and her mother is an opera singer. Once they are in La Paz, her mother has no more music left in her. Her father continues to play his viola and eventually Orly learns how to play an Indian instrument.

This is a Holocaust novel. Yes. But it's also a novel about Orly's adjustment to Bolivia, both physically (that thin air!) and emotionally. She begins to make friends with all sorts of people. She learns Spanish. At first she must work. Eventually, she returns to school. We learn about the waves of refugees. Those that came during the war, like Orly and her family, as well as those arrived after the war. We learn about the political turmoil in Bolivia as well as the racial intolerance native Indians experienced. There's so much more.

Because I listened to the novel, I wasn't able to highlight lines in the book that could have been written to describe the situation in Ukraine - and in Europe - today. But many times, I thought about timeless authoritarianism and intolerance is. Sadly.

I highly recommend Exile Music.
 

 

I recently re-read The Star and the Shamrock by Jean Grainger. It's the book my synagogue book club is discussing this month for a Holocaust Remembrance observance. I read it last spring and wanted to refresh my mind before leading the discussion (or participating in the discussion). I'd gotten it as an Amazon Prime First Read, enjoyed it and thought it would make for a good, slightly different discussion.

After I reread The Star and the Shamrock, I immediately purchased the sequel, The Emerald Horizon, and quickly devoured that one. I think I found The Emerald Horizon a more satisfying read and truthfully, I think that this book would make for a better discussion, but only if The Star and the Shamrock is read first.

In The Star and the Shamrock, Ariella Bannon puts her children, Liesl and Erich, on the Kindertransport out of Germany. She's connected with her missing husband's cousin in England. Cousin Elizabeth will take the children off the train and will care for them until Ariella is able to be with them again. The Star and the Shamrock is about Ariella's difficult decision and the life the children come to have with Elizabeth - first in England and eventually in  Northern Ireland. It's primarily the story of Elizabeth, Liesl and Erich. We don't learn much more about  Ariella or what is happening to her back in Germany.

The Emerald Horizon picks up where The Star and the Shamrock left off. The sequel has two storylines going. We learn about Ariella's life during the war as we continue to learn about the children's lives in Ireland at the end of the war. Ireland at the end of the war is a place of uncertainty for the children of the Kindertransport as they wonder the fate of their families left behind in their home countries and what that will mean for their futures. Berlin at the end of the war remains an extremely dangerous place. Germany might have surrendered but conditions are still grim and it is impossible to know who can be trusted.

Of course what drives Ariella forward is the determination to be reunited with her children. That is something I can definitely relate to.

Grainger keeps adding books to The Star and the Shamrock series. Currently, there are two more novels. Each was declared to be the last in the series so who knows what might be coming. The Hard Way Home is about Liesl's university years and The World Starts Anew which picks up Erich's story in the 1950s. I'm on the fence about whether I'll read on, but I would highly recommend the first two novels in the series.

Send for Me

 

Send for Me, Lauren Fox's semi-autobiographical historical fiction novel, was quite different from what I expected. It's certainly not your typical World War II novel although that's when a good part of the story is set.

Unlike other novels which have alternating storylines between present day adults and their grandparents during World War II, the format of this is not the stand one of alternating chapters or even anything like this.

Similar to the way the author's style is lyrical and poetic, the storylines meander in a less formal structure.  It's a character driven novel and you really feel the love and the ache of loss between the family members.

The two main characters are Annelise and her granddaughter, Clare. Annelise is a young woman when things in Germany start to become uncomfortable for Jews. She's a dreamer and is always looking for the next great thing. She works with her parents in their bakery where she meets the man she will marry. When things get impossible for the Jews in Germany, Annelise and her husband have the opportunity to leave Germany and head to the United States. But what about Annelise's parents?

In present day Wisconsin, Annelise's granddaughter, Clare is  going through some tough times when she finds her grandmother's letters and comes to some realization about the importance of family connections.

Fox's author's note at the end of the novel added an extra dimension to the experience of reading this fairly short  novel.

The Crazy Ladies of Pearl Street

I don’t know where I first heard about The Crazy Ladies of Pearl Street (and why do I often see it written as The Crazyladies...), but it’s been on my radar for quite a long time. Probably since it first was published. I guess I had an interest in reading it because my husband spent part of his growing up time living on Pearl Street. I really had no idea what to expect about this Trevanian autobiographical novel. No idea when it was set or who the characters were. And Trevanian? A mononymous author? What was up with that?

Turns out that this novel is set on North Pearl Street, Albany, in the 1930s. The mostly Irish part of Pearl Street. My husband lived on the other end of Pearl Street, the Italian part of Pearl Street in the late 1950s or early 60s. I envisioned relaying anecdotes from the novel to my husband about the place where he had called home. That turned out not to be the case.

I’m not really sure where the word crazyladies comes in to play. Yes, there were some crazy ladies living on Pearl Street. But the story wasn’t about them. They were merely the supporting characters in the story of Jean-Luc’s time on North Pearl Street. Were his experiences unique to unique to Pearl Street? Or could this story have been set in any poor immigrant neighborhood in the time after the Depression until shortly after World War II?

I liked the snarkiness of the first person narrative, and I loved the use of language. Otherwise, the novel dragged on and I pushed myself to read it quickly… so I could be finished with it. It was good enough that I didn’t want to drop it, but it was keeping me away from books that I imagined I’d like a lot better.

In reading reviews, it seems that fans of other works by Travanian seem to appreciate this one a little bit more. But after slogging through this novel, I have no intention of slogging through another by him.

 

The Book of Lost Names

 

As I was reading Kristin Harmel’s latest historical fiction, The Book of Lost Names, I kept feeling like I’d read this book before. Which would be impossible since it was just published in July of this year. It’s based on a true story so there’s a definite possibility that other novels with similar story lines were based on similar true stories. Overall, the book was unique. I felt like a snippet here was like one novel, another snippet reminded me of another novel. None of that, however, kept me from finishing the book in just a few days. It was a very engaging story.

 Eva Abrams is an 80-something year old librarian in Florida when she spots a New York Times article about books confiscated by the Germans during World War II that are now being returned to their rightful owners. The book pictured with the article is a book that Eva claims as her own. During the war, after escaping from Paris to the Free Zone, Eva falls into a job as a forger of documents to help refugees escape to Switzerland. As she creates new identities for children, she finds a way to record the actual names of the children too young to remember who they really were need to be recorded somewhere so their true identities can be preserved.  She and her fellow forger, Remy, create a code within a religious tome. Hence, “the book of lost names.”

 I highly recommend The Book of Lost Names.

The Star and the Shamrock

I learned about this delightful book from Renee's Reading Club on Facebook. If you can say that a Holocaust novel is delightful. What was especially nice about The Star and the Shamrock by Jean Grainger was that the kindle version was free! How nice is that.

This is a historical fiction novel about the Kindertransport in the early days of World War II. Ariel Bannon, a Jewish woman married to a non-Jew who was arrested and taken away in Germany, feels that the salvation of her children rests on sending her children to Ireland, to her husband's Catholic cousin, Elizabeth... who just happened to have been married briefly to a Jew who was killed on the last day of World War I. Elizabeth was living in Liverpool, England, when Ariel's letter arrives via a circuitous route.

Liesel and Erich Bannon's arrival in Elizabeth's life causes major changes. A bombing in Liverpool forces Elizabeth back to her home in Northern Ireland where she and the children meet a large group of other Kindertransport children - and their protectors.

Back home, living in her mother's house, Elizabeth comes to terms with her relationship with her mother. And she is able to open her heart again, something she thought she would never be able to do after losing her husband and her baby many years before.

There is a sequel available on Amazon about Ariel's story. And then there's a third installment coming out later this summer.

The Paris Architect

I'm thinking that reading a second Holocaust novel so soon after the last was probably not the best idea. While I thought The Tattooist of Auschwitz, based on a true story, was an uplifting novel that gave me hope, The Paris Architect  by Charles Belfoure was incredibly disturbing. It's about a young architect. Lucien, in Paris who tries to mind his own business, always trying to slide by with everything except his architectural designs. He has not yet achieved much success but he's very excited about designing and seeing his work in its final form.

A former client of Lucien connects him with a wealthy man who promises him design work for the Germans in France if he helps him design hiding spots for Jews inside of homes. Lucien is excited of the possibilities of seeing his designs for factories in France turned into reality. He rationalizes that once Germany loses the war, France will need the factories. He agrees to design the first hiding spot because the idea of pulling one over the Germans through his detailed design work gives him satisfaction.

After finishing the book, I looked to see if this story was based on truth. It was, but it wasn't. Nothing like this is known to occur during the Holocaust, but during the reign of Elizabeth I, when Catholicism was banned, "priest holes" were created to hide priests who were observing their religion in secret. Belfoure is trained in architecture and that's clearly evident in the novel.

This is one of my community book club titles for this year. Who knows when we'll get to discuss it, but this novel has many more talking points than The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

From Sand and Ash

I have so much to say about From Sand and Ash, a historical fiction novel by Amy Harmon. Where to begin?

This novel was first suggested as a title for our Jewish book club, way back at the beginning of the book club. As soon as I heard that it was a Holocaust novel I said no. I did not want our Jewish book club to read one Holocaust novel after another. I didn't want us to be that kind of club. I wanted to find other types of novels that had some connection to either Judaism or Israel. Of course, remembrance of the Holocaust has some impact on American Judaism so two of the books we've read have been peripherally related to the Holocaust without being stories of the Holocaust.

Then I realized that our next book club meeting would be in April, the week of our synagogue's Holocaust Remembrance Day observance. We're trying to get new people to attend our book club. Why not pick a Holocaust novel and promote our Holocaust program and our book club together? Since one member so highly recommended this novel (and she hasn't been thrilled with most of the books we've been discussing), we decided to go with it.

Now that I've finished it nearly months prior to our discussion, I should probably write some notes so I can remember the things I want to talk about. I'm torn between wanting to do that here - or just getting to the review. As I've got a desk full of other projects I need to get to work on, I think I'll just go with the review.

At the simplest level, From Sand and Ash is about star-crossed lovers, Eva and Angelo. Eva is an Italian Jew and Angelo is an Italian-American, destined to be a priest. After Angelo's mother dies in childbirth, his father sends him to Florence to live with his grandparents who happen to be household employees of Eva's father. The two, from early times together, have trouble defining their relationship. They're being raised in the same household so they feel like siblings in one way. But maybe the relationship is closer to being cousins. Readers know that there might be more to it.

War comes to Italy. The Germans take control. And racial laws are put into place restricting what Jews can and can't do. It greatly impacts the lives of Eva, Angelo, and their families. Angelo's calling to become a priest is greater than his pull to create a life with Eva. He heads off to Rome and Eva stays behind in Florence.

Eventually, Angelo deems it no longer safe for Eva to stay in Florence so he brings her to Rome and hides her in a convent. This is where the meat of the story is. I knew that Italians (and the Catholic Church), more than people from any other European country, did a lot to hide their Jews. This novel gives a full taste of how that was done. Eva doesn't want to simply be hidden. She wants to help while she is waiting out the war.

Harmon's language creates quite the picture of what life must have been like in Italy with the Gestapo in charge. Eva and Angelo are fully developed characters who maintain their humanity as the world around them is falling to pieces. I'd highly recommend this novel.

There is so much that can be discussed about this book and I look forward to the discussion.

The Japanese Lover

I'm not sure if I really enjoyed Isabel Allende's The Japanese Lover more than I might have because it's the first audio book I've listened to in years. In my previous life, I spent lots of hours in the car alone and I always had an audio book going. Usually the audio books I listened to were lighter than the books I was reading in print. But sometimes I'd listen to a book club book or a book I needed to read for my work as a fifth grade teacher.

The Japanese Lover is a BIG book. Not in terms of length, but it terms of all the themes covered in the book. Included in this novel is a story about Poland during World War II, a refuge child sent to California. A little girl growing up with her extended family. A young woman running away from her old life. Japanese internment. Sex slaves. Child pornography. Recreating life after a life altering injury. Taking on a new identity to run from an ugly past. Falling in love. Art. Gardening. AIDS. And aging. I don't think I've forgotten anything. If I have, apologies.

Alma is a young child when she leaves her parents and Poland to go live with her mother's sister and her family in San Francisco. She is in her 70s when she moves to Lark House, a home with stepped up care from independent living to assisted living to end-of-life care. Living in a community where there are mostly older adults, that was something I could relate to. She hires Irina, a careworker in the home, to be her personal assistant. Each woman has secrets, but as they grow closer, their secrets come out. This is in part due to Alma's grandson, Seth, who is writing a family history, digging into Alma's past.

The characters are well developed and each of the subplots feels complete. I never felt as though the author was rushing through one story to get to another. I'd highly recommend this one, and will probably suggest it to my book club as a possible title for discussion.

I was reminded by how much I enjoy listening to audio books. I need to find one that my husband and I can enjoy together. Or I need to find more alone time in the car!

A break in my reading slump

I'm not sure if I'm in a reading slump because I just can't seem to get into Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (which I'm reading for Books and Beer Club) or if I just haven't felt like reading. But the longer I went without making a dent in any book, the more anxious I began to feel. So I picked up The Red Address Book which I'd read about in a "reading lovers" Facebook group I'd joined. Everyone in the group loved it. It sounded like it could be a quick, easy read.

It was quick. I finished it in a single day. It was relatively easy. And it was just okay. What really made it relatable, though, was the day before, while visiting an elderly cousin, she spent time thumbing through her address book, reminiciscing about the people listed in the pages. That had brought back memories of my dad and I going through his contacts on his smart phone, "updating" the contacts. While we updated, we talked about nearly every person he had listed. I learned more about his life and relationships in addition to learning who was still alive and who was dead.

In an attempt to tell her great niece, Jenny, about her life, 96-year old Doris thumbs through the old address book her father had given her when she was just a girl. As each entry died, she marked them dead. This novel focuses on just a few of the entries. I think I wish there had been some other people she told stories about, even if they weren't so central to her story. We learn about the impact each individual had on Doris' life. And she had quite a life!

I did love how relatable and authentic Jenny was portrayed. Her interactions with her great aunt were spot on!

Would I recommend it? If you're in the mood for a book about a full life and what it's like to reach the end of it, you might enjoy this.

I think I'd prefer the film version

The last book that Books and Beer Club read was The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy by Judith L. Pearson. I'm writing this several days after I finished the book (which is what I often do), but I'm also writing after the book club meeting, something I tend to not do. A book club meeting can change my initial impressions about a book and I like my reviews to reflect how I feel at the time I finished the book.

Each book club meeting starts with us giving the book a thumbs up, thumbs down or sideways. We had 20 people at this week's meeting. A large majority (nearly everyone) gave it a thumb's up. I was one of the few sideways thumbs. Virginia Hall's story, being an American female spy in World War II France was incredible. But Judith Pearson's writing was at times very dry. I did need refreshers about some what was going on in France before and during WWII. But many of those sections read like a text book. Some of the narrative about other spies that Virginia interacted with read like a phone book. As a result, it took me three weeks to plod through this book.

Not only wasn't I swayed by other book club members' more positive reviews, many of them did comment that the writing style was a bit dry. So I wasn't the only one who had very mixed feelings about The Wolves at the Door.

More highly recommended to us at the meeting was A Woman of No Importance, written by Sonia Purnell, published this year. While looking up that book, I read this:

So why haven't more people heard about Hall? A quote from Hall on the agency display offers an explanation: "Many of my friends were killed for talking too much."
But now — more than 70 years after her wartime exploits in France, and almost 40 years after her death — Virginia Hall is having a moment. Three books have just come out. Two movies are in the works.

 I am still considering picking up Purnell's book. But then again, I might just wait for the movie.

The Orphan's Tale

I can't recall where I first heard about The Orphan's Tale by Pam Jenoff. But it immediately made me think about Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants. The only similarities between the books are the settings, the circus, and the time period. I think. Both stories took place in the past. There the similarities end. What I liked best about Water for Elephants was that it was different. The same holds true for The Orphan's Tale.

The Orphan's Tale is the story of two strong women who are forced to work together in a traveling circus during World War II. There is no love lost between the two of them at the start. But over time, they become the family that each one of them has lost. It is based on a real circumstance. That of traveling circuses hiring Jews as circus performers as a way to protect them.

This is a book that I would definitely recommend to anyone who feels like can handle one more book about the Holocaust.

The Lilac Girls

Another book that was suggested to my community book club which wasn't selected was Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly. Similar to LaRose, it's another book that begs to be discussed but for many in the book club, I think it would be too much of "the same." We probably haven't read a Holocaust book in a long while, and this book, told from three different perspectives, differs from many other books we've read in the past. But this book would not have been a good fit for our book club at this time.

Lilac Girls tells its Holocaust tale from the perspectives of New York City socialite, Caroline, Polish political prisoner, Kasia, and  German doctor, Herta, a loyal Nazi whose dedication to the party quickly overtakes the Hippocratic Oath. Lilac Girls is based on the true story of  women whose lives were somehow connected thru experiences at the only women's concentration camp, Ravensbruck, during World War II.

Kasia's story, as a prisoner, was most grizzly and probably the type of story that readers to Holocaust novels are most familiar with. Kasia had become part of a teen underground in Lublin, Poland, in the early years of the war and when she gets arrested, her sister and mother get caught up and sent to Ravensbruck along with her.

Herta's story was less familiar and because of that much more disturbing. Herta was upset by Hitler's forbidding women from being surgeons. She applies for a job at Ravensbruck, which she understands to be a "reeducation camp for women, 90 km north of Berlin, near the resort town of Furstenberg on Lake Schwedt." On her first day, she is instructed to lethally inject an elderly prisoner. Her initial reaction was to flee. But her desire to be a surgeon quickly wins over, she stays and transforms into a monstrous part of the Nazi party machine.

I'd read about "medical experimentation" on Jewish concentration camp victims. This novel went into much more detail regarding what was involved with the particular non-Jewish group of women prisoners at Ravensbruck. The experimentation subjects became known as the Ravensbruck Rabbits. The novel says that's due to the women "hopping around the camp" after surgery and because they were the camp guinea pigs. In my mind, it was solely the latter.

The Ravensbruck Rabbits was an actual group of women. Herta Oberheuser was an actual doctor. And Caroline Ferriday was an actual socialite who wanted to make sure that the story of the Ravensbruck Rabbits was told.

Herta's story begs one to wonder just how quickly and easily the transformation from one who wants to save lives to one who is okay with ending innocent lives can happen. No matter how many books I read, I will never understand.

Caroline's story had a component of a "forbidden love" story, full of the soap opera miscommunications and missed opportunities. And as I was reading, I wondered how her story was going to intersect the stories of Kasia and Herta. Caroline's story also brought me back to wondering about what my young mother knew about what was going on in Europe during the 1940s.

I can't say I enjoyed reading this book. Impossible to enjoy. And thinking about what I was reading contributed to one night of very poor sleep. However, it certainly told a different story from two points of view that I was less familiar with. It is because of the different point of view that I am able to recommend Lilac Girls with reservations to anyone who is a frequent reader of Holocaust historical fiction.

Summer of My German Soldier

Before I say anything about the book, it did feel good to be reading Young Adult Fiction again. Okay... now...

As soon as I finished Summer of My German Soldier, I thought, "Oh, I loved this." But now as I sit here pondering how I'm going to write my thoughts on the book, I'm having second thoughts.

It wasn't at all what I expected. I had no idea that the main character, Patty Bergen, was Jewish. I also always thought that "the girl" was closer in age to "the boy." That wasn't the case. Anton, the soldier, was 22 years old to Patty's 12 years. I also thought I was going to learn more about the German POWs. (After reading When We Meet Again, I want to learn more about the German POW situation in the US during WWII. This book didn't teach me anything. Nothing.) That was probably my biggest disappointment.

What I think the main idea of the story is supposed to be is that Patty, a young Jewish girl, helps a German "Nazi" prisoner of war escape from the POW camp in rural Arkansas. That was such a little part of the book. This book would not be a great book for students to learn anything about the imprisonment of Germans in the US during WWII.

What I think the main idea of the story really was coming of age, a girl coming to value herself. Patty is not valued by her very dysfunctional family. As the only Jewish family in the rural southern town, she's an outcast amongst her classmates. She just doesn't fit in and she places the blame for that squarely on her own shoulders. She's simply unlovable. Her only friend is her housekeeper/nanny, Ruth. Patty finally asserts herself by waiting on a German prisoner customer, Anton, in her parents' department store. She takes things into her own hands when she witnesses him trying to escape. This is the real value of the book.

In the e-book edition that I read, there was a preview of the sequel to Summer - Morning is A Long Time Coming. The second novel picks up when Patty is 18, graduating from high school. I may or may not read this sequel at a later date.

I think I need to do a little more research about Bette Greene, though. She admits in the forward that she is Patty and that Patty's parents are her parents. I wonder, was any of the POW part of the story true.

Two in a row with When We Meet Again

I'm really not sure what I was thinking when I picked up When We Meet Again by Kristin Harmel immediately after finishing Stones from the River.

Both books have plots based on post-World War II Germany. While Stones from the River was set in Germany, When We Meet Again was set mostly in Florida and in Atlanta.

Did you know that there were German prisoner-of-war camps in Florida during World War II? I had no idea! That's what attracted me to this very different book. I wanted to know more. The book gave me some information and inspired me to do some additional research on my own as I was reading. There's a POW camp museum not too far from where I live and I've added it to my list of places to visit in the state.

Years ago, in my book club in New Jersey, we read When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka. That's a story about Japanese internment camps. Because I was teaching fifth grade, I was already familiar with Japanese internment during World War II. But at my book club discussion, this was the first time some of these really, really smart and educated people were learning about what the US did to the Japanese during the war. We ended up talking quite a bit about why we had never learned about Japanese interment when we were in school. We decided that it was probably for the same reasons that we grew up believing that  Christopher Columbus was a hero. One of the older women in the book club remembered life in New Jersey during World War II. She remembered that several German families had been relocated to her neighborhood, most probably because they might have been suspected spies. We decided that while Germans weren't interned the way that the Japanese were, these forced relocations were for similar purposes. (I guess I really need to read The Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene. That book sat on my classroom shelf for all the years I taught fifth grade and I never thought to pick it up. Had I, I most likely would have known about German prisoner of war camps. I'm off to add that book to my TBR list.)

When We Meet Again is a love story. A German prisoner in the POW camp outside of the Everglades falls in love with a local gal. And his love is reciprocated. Circumstances keep them apart after the war. (Who knew that German POWs who spent time in the US had to do another 2 years of hard labor in Great Britain before returning to Germany? Not me.)

When We Meet Again is about going through life with baggage. It's about running away from your past. It's about learning how to forgive. It's about looking forward. It's about relationships. 

When We Meet Again is about art. A painting that looks like Emily's grandmother is delivered to Emily, anonymously, shortly after Emily's grandmother's death. Is the subject her grandmother? Who sent the painting? Who was the artist? What is the story behind the painting? That, in a nutshell, is the plot.

The story is told in alternating stories. We read Emily's story from the present day and we read the story of Peter, the POW, starting during the war and ending in the present day. It was an effective way to tell the story.

There were a few things I didn't like about the book. The writing was pretty bare bones. After experiencing the lyrical language of Stones in the River, this language was ordinary. In fact, it was so ordinary that I was surprised to see how many novels Kristin Harmel has written. Parts of the story were very, very predictable. At times I got impatient to get my predictions confirmed. Passage of time wasn't smooth either. At one point Emily mentions that she received the painting months ago. Yet in terms of what had happened in the story, it seemed as though she'd received the painting on the week before.

What did I like about this novel? I really enjoyed learning something new - about the prisoner of war camps in Florida. That was fascinating. I also really liked the way the author ended the novel. Yes, the ending was pretty predictable. But the way it was handled by Harmel was so well done. The way the ending was handled really made the book for me. That very rarely happens.

Now it's time to read a little something lighter.